McTeague by Frank Norris (leveled readers TXT) 📕

Little by little they pacified him, or rather (for he paid but little attention to what was said to him) his bestial fury lapsed by degrees. He turned away and let fall his arms, drawing long breaths, and looking stupidly about him, now searching helplessly upon the ground, now gazing vaguely into the circle of faces about him. His ear bled as though it would never stop.

“Say, Doctor,” asked Heise, “what’s the best thing to do?”

“Huh?” answered McTeague. “What⁠—what do you mean? What is it?”

“What’ll we do to stop this bleeding here?”

McTeague did not answer, but looked intently at the bloodstained bosom of his shirt.

“Mac,” cried Trina, her face close to his, “tell us something⁠—the best thing we can do to stop your ear bleeding.”

“Collodium,” said the dentist.

“But we can’t get to that right away; we⁠—”

“There’s some ice in our lunch basket,” broke in Heise. “We brought it for the beer; and take the napkins and make a bandage.”

“Ice,” muttered the dentist, “sure, ice, that’s the word.”

Mrs. Heise and the Ryers were looking after Marcus’s broken arm. Selina sat on the slope of the grass, gasping and sobbing. Trina tore the napkins into strips, and, crushing some of the ice, made a bandage for her husband’s head.’

The party resolved itself into two groups; the Ryers and Mrs. Heise bending over Marcus, while the harness-maker and Trina came and went about McTeague, sitting on the ground, his shirt, a mere blur of red and white, detaching itself violently from the background of pale-green grass. Between the two groups was the torn and trampled bit of turf, the wrestling ring; the picnic baskets, together with empty beer bottles, broken eggshells, and discarded sardine tins, were scattered here and there. In the middle of the improvised wrestling ring the sleeve of Marcus’s shirt fluttered occasionally in the sea breeze.

Nobody was paying any attention to Selina. All at once she began to giggle hysterically again, then cried out with a peal of laughter:

“Oh, what a way for our picnic to end!”

“Now, then, Maria,” said Zerkow, his cracked, strained voice just rising above a whisper, hitching his chair closer to the table, “now, then, my girl, let’s have it all over again. Tell us about the gold plate⁠—the service. Begin with, ‘There were over a hundred pieces and every one of them gold.’ ”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Zerkow,” answered Maria. “There never was no gold plate, no gold service. I guess you must have dreamed it.”

Maria and the redheaded Polish Jew had been married about a month after the McTeague’s picnic which had ended in such lamentable fashion. Zerkow had taken Maria home to his wretched hovel in the alley back of the flat, and the flat had been obliged to get another maid of all work. Time passed, a month, six months, a whole year went by. At length Maria gave birth to a child, a wretched, sickly child, with not even strength enough nor wits enough to cry. At the time of its birth Maria was out of her mind, and continued in a state of dementia for nearly ten days. She recovered just in time to make the arrangements for the baby’s burial. Neither Zerkow nor Maria was much affected by either the birth or the death of this little child. Zerkow had welcomed it with pronounced disfavor, since it had a mouth to be fed and wants to be provided for. Maria was out of her head so much of the time that she could scarcely remember how it looked when alive. The child was a mere incident in their lives, a thing that had come undesired and had gone unregretted. It had not even a name; a strange, hybrid little being, come and gone within a fortnight’s time, yet combining in its puny little body the blood of the Hebrew, the Pole, and the Spaniard.

But the birth of this child had peculiar consequences. Maria came out of her dementia, and in a few days the household settled itself again to its sordid regime and Maria went about her duties as usual. Then one evening, about a week after the child’s burial, Zerkow had asked Maria to tell him the story of the famous service of gold plate for the hundredth time.

Zerkow had come to believe in this story infallibly. He was immovably persuaded that at one time Maria or Maria’s people had possessed these hundred golden dishes. In his perverted mind the hallucination had developed still further. Not only had that service of gold plate once existed, but it existed now, entire, intact; not a single burnished golden piece of it was missing. It was somewhere, somebody had it, locked away in that leather trunk with its quilted lining and round brass locks. It was to be searched for and secured, to be fought for, to be gained at all hazards. Maria must know where it was; by dint of questioning, Zerkow would surely get the information from her. Some day, if only he was persistent, he would hit upon the right combination of questions, the right suggestion that would disentangle Maria’s confused recollections. Maria would tell him where the thing was kept, was concealed, was buried, and he would go to that place and secure it, and all that wonderful gold would be his forever and forever. This service of plate had come to be Zerkow’s mania.

On this particular evening, about a week after the child’s burial, in the wretched back room of the Junk shop, Zerkow had made Maria sit down to the table opposite him⁠—the whiskey bottle and the red glass tumbler with its broken base between them⁠—and had said:

“Now, then, Maria, tell us that story of the gold dishes again.”

Maria stared at him, an expression of perplexity coming into her face.

“What gold dishes?” said she.

“The ones your people used to own in Central America. Come on, Maria, begin, begin.” The Jew craned himself forward,